Fitzgerald and France, or “The Course of True Love Never did Run Smooth”: A Review Essay

Fitzgerald’s status in France has had its ups and downs. The first publication and translation of The Great Gatsby by Victor Llona was quite a fiasco in terms of impact, as very well documented by Michael Nowlin in his article “Fitzgerald’s Survival of French Neglect.” Fortunately, later translations, in particular by Jacques Tournier, managed to do justice to his talent, and in the 1970s André Le Vot’s academic work signaled the climax of French intellectuals’ and scholars’ interest in the novelist. Later on, in the early 1990s, Tender Is the Night was on the syllabus for the “agrégation,”¹ and young scholars tackled the subject in new ways for their doctoral dissertations (Bouzonviller, “Beyond”). In 2003, I spoke of a “Fitzgerald frenzy” (“Autumnal”), and it seems that over the past few years we have been again in one of those passionate waves where Fitzgerald can be found throughout France in bookstores, popular magazines, the female press and more intellectual newspapers and magazines, on screen, on the radio, and on stage. In a very stimulating collective work about the art of translation and The Great Gatsby in particular, Quand l’Europe retraduit The Great Gatsby: Le corps transfrontalier duu texte, Véronique Béghain explains that Gatsby came into the public domain outside the U.S. in 2011, inducing a multitude of new translations throughout Europe. These new translations have celebrated anew Fitzgerald’s skill as a writer and revealed his impact on contemporary European readers.

In 2010, Lots of Love: Scott et Scottie (Correspondance 1936–1940), a collection of translated letters from Fitzgerald to his daughter, Scottie, was on display in major bookstores like Decitre in Lyon in its well stocked English-language section. But it was 2011 that really became the busy Fitzgerald year, with Julie Wolkenstein’s publication of a translation entitled Gatsby, which led many specialists and journalists to speculate about her choice of this shortened title. Because of this choice, the book was much debated and therefore advertised in the general press. Another translator, Jean François Merle, has adopted this title more recently, whereas a book of comic strips by Benjamin Bachelier et Stéphane Melchior-Durand setting the plot in the China of the early 2000s has kept the original title. Two other publications appeared in 2011: The Crack-Up, translated as L’Effondrement by Élise Argaud, and Un Livre à soi et autres écrits personnels, a collection of various essays by Fitzgerald translated by Pierre Guglielmina, who had already translated The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald as Carnets in 2002.

In 2012, a very attractive pink-covered volume advertised a brand new translation of The Great Gatsby in the “folio anniversaire” collection by Gallimard. With this translation, Philippe Jaworski was only preparing a much more ambitious work because, a few months later, he was the editor of the Pléiade collection dedicated to Fitzgerald. In my contribution to the first issue of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review in 2002, I had mentioned my hope to see Fitzgerald published in this prestigious collection since, in France, it is a way of celebrating a writer as a classic (“‘Beyond the Inky Sea’” 225). So now we have this two-volume edition of Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, and essays introduced by Jaworski, who had previously edited Melville’s work in this same de luxe series. New translations and commentaries were contributed in the Pléiade collection by a group of prominent French scholars, notably Pascale Antolin. Besides 1,777 pages of Fitzgerald’s texts, the two volumes offer a fully documented bibliography, a detailed introduction by Jaworski and multiple footnotes and explanatory notes. We have come a long way from Llona’s awkward attempt at sharing his interest in Fitzgerald with French readers; the novelist’s talent has at last been acknowledged openly in the French world of letters in this impressive publication. Eventually, Jaworski also extended his extensive work on Fitzgerald to publish an annotated high school edition of his translation of The Great Gatsby, especially...